I am in the midst of writing a PhD proposal that addresses codifying one’s tacit knowledge. From my M.Ed. project I was able to identify a number of possible methods. However, I am looking for a more efficient method to help participants track ‘a-ha’ moments in their life.
Has anyone come across some form of ‘tracker’ or ‘curation’ tool that I could look into?
Jeff 
Hi Jeff,
I can share with you three generations of self-knowledge tools I rely on since 1994.
Generation 1 was none other than a daily journal to keep track of my ambitions, thoughts, ideas. The journal delivered all the benefits writing brings in this context including more confidence, clarity and a sense of purpose. I can’t say any single day’s journal delivered an ‘a-ha’ moment however. Instead I feel the process of keeping journals day-over-day, year-over-year were instrumental gradually building my know-how in any one particular area of interest.
Generation 2 tools were more deliberate and represented a process of setting objectives and planning ways to achieve them at the start of the year and then journaling action/progress over the course of the year. Here also i cannot say ‘a-ha’ moments came as a result of any one thing. Instead, re-reading previous year’s objectives, and the experience in trying to achieve them, was probably effective in gradually building know-how for future plans.
In generation 3, the tools are enabling the data-driven, near-real time self-tracking I am currently doing. Here there have been more ‘a-ha’ moments as a direct result of the descriptive/explanatory analysis performed on the data collected. This is expected considering generation 3 tools collect, analyze and output structured data (as opposed to semi-structured natural language text from Gen 1 +2 tools).
I suppose an opportunity for a generation 4 set of tools is to focus on implementing a similar descriptive/explanatory/predictive analysis against the gen 1+2 journal text! - this would produce more ‘a-ha’ insights from the data collected in Gen 1 and 2.
Hope this helps.
Sergio
Excellent overview @Sergio!
I see how you are looking to data to define ‘a-ha’ moments as well as my idea of those that are explicit throughout the day.
I like the gen 4 idea, but it also needs an internal feedback reflection component that guides the user through a series of question both at the time of the event as well as at some later time. (Schon reflection ‘in’ vs ‘on’)
all of these reflection get added to the data.
About my Research
Underlying Foundation: “We know more than we can tell” Polanyi
What if …
-big data was mined for the sake of the individual and not an enterprise?
-every learning instance in your life was ‘curated’ so you could know what you know?
-instead of teaching ‘what to know’ or ‘how to learn’ we encourage people to curate what they already know? [and then determine what they need for a credential]
Jeff
Polanyi has been very useful to me in thinking about these topics - since you mentioned him, I thought I’d give a link:
Hi Jeff,
Was nice to find this post. I am a PhD student, and working on my own proposal - which aligns with the idea of " what if big data was mined for the sake of the individual and not an enterprise?" 
I would love to read your PhD dissertation for inspiration, if you can point me to it!